“Guilty,” Gretchen said. She sat up, and Dave caught a flash of cleavage that he felt simultaneously guilty and blessed for having seen. “I have an idea.”
“Is it a prank?”
“Not this time.” She propped herself up on his bed, her elbows locked, the plunging V-neck T-shirt making it impossible to not at least glance in her direction. “Could we maybe watch a movie instead? Will your academic life survive if we do that? I want to watch a movie with you, but I don’t want to be responsible for your downfall.”
“You know,” Dave said, getting up from his desk chair, “since it seems like tonight’s one of those nights where I can’t stop certain things from spilling out of my mouth”—he walked around to the far side of the bed, grabbing his remote off the nightstand, not entirely believing that he was allowing himself to say what he was saying, that he even had the ability to speak like this—“I don’t think I’d mind if you were my downfall. Not one bit. A movie with you sounds perfect.”
Gretchen smiled and kicked her shoes off and adjusted one of Dave’s pillows so she could lie back comfortably. Dave had had daydreams a lot like this. Since when did real life act this way? “You get to choose the movie,” Gretchen said, “but it has to fall within one of two categories: cute, or ridiculously bad.”
“You don’t happen to know of any that fall in the ‘both’ category, do you?”
“Too many, actually.”
They chose a B-list horror movie about sharks in the woods and turned off the lights. Gretchen’s foot laid against his before the opening credits had even finished.
“Who do you think is going to die first?” Dave asked, leaning just a little bit in her direction.
“The smartest character,” Gretchen said with no hesitation.
“Really? Why?”
“You can’t have smart people lingering around for too long in horror movies. Otherwise they come up with solutions and not enough people die.”
“Good point,” Dave said. The movie’s run time was ninety-four minutes, and he felt a rush of gratitude knowing that he would spend every single one of those with Gretchen nearby. “I can’t wait for all the shark puns.”
“Ooh, you think there’ll be shark puns?” Gretchen smiled. The stud in her ear glinted green, reflecting the light from the TV.
“I would be willing to bet five hundred points on my SAT score that someone is going to say, ‘We’re finished.’”
Gretchen snorted, smacking him slightly across the ribs. “I can’t believe how quickly you came up with one.”
Dave shrugged, folding his hands over his stomach and maybe sticking his elbows out a little more than was comfortable so that they would brush against Gretchen’s side.
As the movie ran on, Dave noticed that he and Gretchen talked almost as much as the characters on the screen did. With every comment or joke, they scooched closer to each other, Dave pretending not to notice the diminishing space between them, wondering if Gretchen was pretending, too. He laughed at the movie, and at Gretchen’s jokes, and in their laughter he found little excuses to touch, to lean into her.
When Gretchen would lean into him, Dave could smell her breath (honey, too). He would think about kissing her but laugh instead, or he would shift so that his leg was touching more of hers. The closer he got to her, the more he wanted to kiss her, the more insane it felt that he wasn’t already kissing her.
On the screen, a shark swam in the creek near where the characters had set up camp. The ditzy redhead and the bro-y one who kept saying he knew kung fu were making out in a tent.
“Do you think it’s a good way to go or a bad way to go?” Gretchen asked, her knee bent and resting on Dave’s thigh.
“Eaten by a shark in a forest? Pretty bad.”
“No,” Gretchen said, “while making out.”